00:46:36 · Molly O'Shea, Joon Sung Park
[00:46:36] S0: the way, I heard DoorDash has amazing AI talent, like very underrated. [00:46:39] S1: They are killers. Yeah. The thing I always appreciate about DoorDash and that particular team they're soft spoken in some ways, but they fought in an extremely brutally competitive market and they won. That speaks volume. So we have amazing group of engineers, and product and talent, and this is now matched with amazing group of go to market and people on the deployment side. We are very forward deployed as a company. So that part is led by one of my co founders, Lainie Yellen. But our fundamental thesis of this company is one, the data, the model is extremely important. Simulation is basically in its GPT-four, GPT-4.5 era where the technology is here to make impact, but this technology is changing and evolving every single month. And a lot of this battle is also going to be in the market in our for deployed motion. And this is something that I look to the previous sort of cycles in the recent AI cycle. For instance, I look at coding, agent decoding era. I actually have found that companies that were forward deployed actually found a lot of success. Their relationship became stickier, became much more defensible over time, and I think that's also going to repeat in simulation because I really do see the simulation space as one that's going to reach its maturity to a point where in about a year and a half to two years, we'll be where a coding agent as an industry is today. So I think there's a lot of learning that we're also taking from that era.
00:48:19 · Molly O'Shea, Joon Sung Park
[00:48:19] S0: We're also in an era of spies and people leaking information and flight risk employees. What just happened with they had a spy or someone bugged them? Yeah. Do you, do you help HR teams try to determine who to hire, who not to hire? [00:48:39] S1: So these are some of the use cases that we get and we do in some cases collaborate. And of course, we do this with informed consent and autonomy, again, from the members of our customers' companies. But some of the use cases that we hear is many of the companies, especially as they get large, they're deeply interested in retention. How can we make sure that our members are excited and especially our most most performant, members are committed to the company? And that is something that we can help simulate. Another one is they also want to recruit. So imagine right now you are a company that is trying to recruit the most talented students from Stanford, MIT. What is the right way to communicate to that population, that is also something that we can help simulate. So it's not just about understanding the consumers or the customers. It's really about understanding everyone that's in our ecosystem, and many of those important stakeholders are actually internal.
00:49:43 · Molly O'Shea
[00:49:43] S0: I have to say the more we talk and the more you answer questions, the more nervous I'm getting, and I feel like you can read my mind a little I don't know if that is a common occurrence that you have, but I genuinely am like, shit, you did your research. What does the simulation say? Okay, so as we close out, this is one of my favorite questions. You kind of already answered it, but I'm worried, like, I'm curious, maybe you can... Maybe you have a different answer. But one of my favorite questions is our partner question with Brex, which might have showed up in your simulation, but it's all about performance. So Brex is about performance, spending smarter moving faster. I take this in a personal bend. So I think that's a matter of who you surround yourself with. Some people say it's your five closest friends. You might have a more scientific answer to that, but it could be a mentor, it could be someone who's inspired you along the way. I know you were also a painter, so maybe it's an artist, I don't know. But I am curious, who is that person for you or those people?
00:50:47 · Joon Sung Park
[00:50:47] S1: So for me, the people I respect the most and I love the most in my career actually were people with two traits. One is, are they the common denominator of success? Are these people who, in different era of their career, who stood up to basically say, I will make this successful no matter how everything else goes. I will be the reason why this will be successful. That always for me demonstrated their ability to reinvent themselves and take deep ownership. And the other one is people who have superpowers but two superpowers that's really not supposed to coexist in the same person. These are people who I sometimes describe, one of my cofounders Michael this way, where he is a very mature scientist, understands all about the scientific methodology and so forth, but at the same time he's a child who gets excited by creating game demo. Or Laini Allen who is deeply paranoid on day to day basis that we have to do everything right now and really make sure that we do everything we can to make this successful, but at the same time deeply religious that believes that no matter what happens we will win and we will succeed. Those kind of tension I found to be particularly beautiful. And of course Percy, famously within the Stanford community, my last co founder, he's a pianist, but he's also one of the most well known AI researchers. Amazing combination. So these people really do inspire me. And for people who are the common denominator of success, you can see that. You can feel in their behavior, in their career. I was actually recently coming back, from a workshop and I happened to sit next to a scholar named Sandy Pentland. He used to be at MIT Media Lab as a professor for a long time, actually trained many of the most brilliant minds in my field and in the computer sciences more broadly. He also has had this kind of amazing career, and this is somebody that I always look up to, where he had many generations, where there was an era where he was a physicist. There was an era when he was an AI researcher and ended up training some of the most well known AI researchers of that generation. There was an era when he was a computational social scientist. And in each of the era, you could see that Sandy was such an influential character. That's always an amazing power to observe.
00:53:21 · Molly O'Shea, Joon Sung Park
[00:53:21] S0: And what makes that up? Like, how did those people become that different person in each era? It's just extreme commitment and durability. Like, what is it? [00:53:30] S1: I think it's extreme commitment, stamina, the ability to continuously get excited. And these are also people who are looking... Who's in the game so that they can play the next game. These are people whose greatest prize in winning the current game is gaining the right and invitation to play the next game. That's what makes them special. And, also, that's something that we try to emulate. [00:53:58] S0: If those are the traits of success, what are the traits of failure? What causes people to fail?
00:53:58 · Molly O'Shea, Joon Sung Park
[00:53:58] S0: If those are the traits of success, what are the traits of failure? What causes people to fail? [00:54:04] S1: You know, think as they say, every family that doesn't work out have their own reasons. I think every failure can look slightly differently. But I think the reverse of what I said, I think can sometimes be modes of failures, that you're trying to overly optimize for that one particular outcome. One thing that I often saw was there is that one particular fundraising you want to run. There is that one customer that you're trying to run against. There is that one best paper that you want to win, and you win it. And you go, now what? And they lose interest. And this is where I've seen so many institutions, individuals who have achieved incredible things at some point in their career and then lose interest and over time disappear. And whether that is failure or not, that's not for me to say. In many of those cases, I think it could actually be seen as an amazing success. But for those who want to play this game for a long time and have impact across many generations and many eras, that is a failure mode. [00:55:08] S0: So it's the difference between short term thinking and long term thinking. Fascinating. [00:55:12] S1: And why are we doing this? Yeah. Are we doing this so we can have an exit tomorrow? Or are we doing it because we want to fundamentally reshape how our society operates for the better? [00:55:25] S0: So what happens if someone comes to you and offers you $15,000,000,000 to sell your company?